[Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity

[ruth topol]

Hi Foo Keong
 
>From the info you give it sounds as though you're planning to use a qualitative approach - 
you've told us  what your method of data collection is although you haven't explicitly said what your Methodology is .... so your overall research strategy isn't clear (to me anyhow). 
 
What is also not clear is how you plan to triangulate the data you collect .... so I'd imagine that you need a 'mixed methods' approach if you don't want to have your work pulled apart on the grounds that it is neither 'reliable' nor 'valid'. 
 
Have  a look at Cohen,L., Manion, L., Morrison, K. (2007). Research Methods in Education. 6th ed. London: Routledge. There's a whole section on historical and documentary research in education. 
 
Perhaps you need to revisit some basics before going much further because if you don't pull it apart yourself (at all of the stages) someone else will! 
 
I'm a mere and lowly Master's student doing a Dissertation right now on numeracy practices in specific workplaces so I'm not criticising you, only offering another student's view of  how to approach an important piece of research for academic purposes. 
 
To me it's very largely about planning and that includes planning for the unexpected. So I would revisit a lot of things in your case before you go much further if you want a good outcome (and if you want to enjoy your project). Perhaps over a coffee with your supervisor... a chat?
 
That's my 2 p's worth from a very humble Master's student! 
 
Ruth Topol, Nottingham, UK
 

--- On Sun, 28/3/10, Ng Foo Keong <lefouque at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Ng Foo Keong <lefouque at gmail.com>
Subject: [Maths-Education] Socio-Mathematical Identity
To: maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Date: Sunday, 28 March, 2010, 15:59


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hi everybody,

thanks to everybody for your inputs.

another big problem i have is my data and methodology.  i
conducted over 10 interviews for each of my four cases (all
adult pre-service teachers) over a year.  i also tried to take
pictures of their artifacts, and some of their lesson plans to
"corroborate" some of what they say, however, each person
could/would volunteer different sets of things.  the only
thing i have in common across all my four cases are the
interview data  -- the volunteers' self-accounts.

i do not have a hold over my volunteers.  for obvious reasons
i cannot put a gun at them and say "give me all your artifacts".
even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to give me things
like their mathematical workbooks from primary school etc
as these would have been thrown away.  all these make my
research extremely difficult.

can i still adopt a "narrative approach" (a la Sfard) to identity?
are there non-narrative approaches?  can i make any claims
based only on volunteers' stories about their (formal and
informal) mathematical learning experiences?

there are many nuggets in the data, i believe, that can
contribute to a theory of identity (especially from non-mathematical
daily life activities and other fields).  the problem is whether
oral accounts alone are acceptable.  if not, is there a way out of
this conundrum i myself in?

thanks and regards,
Ng, F.K.
PhD student, Singapore